So this is blatant plagiarism of The Joel Test…
This is specifically targeted at Technical Support organizations, or anyone providing support for a technical product or service.
- Do you have a fault / issue tracking application (extra point for providing customers access to it).
- Do you have a knowledgebase (extra point for providing customers access to it).
- Do your technical folks have a working, test/demo version of the product.
- Do you send out support alerts (do you announce bug fixes / patches).
- Do you have remote access to customer machines.
- Do you have a published, well known case escalation process.
- Do you have a published, well known priority / severity level list with an example of each level.
- Do you get candidates to troubleshoot during the interview.
- Do you have handsfree headsets, conference phones.
- Do you have a published SLA (or similar set of customer expectations)
- Do you have a published, well known and measured SLA with the team(s) you escalate to.
- Can a support engineer easily determine if a customer has a maintenance agreement or not (if appropriate)
I had also considered adding ‘Do you require that every case closed is linked to a KB article’ but some people find this a bit extreme. I find it is a great driver for keeping your KB up to date and living, otherwise it ages and becomes obsolete very quickly – there’s no point having it if it contains outdate / useless information and your customers are not using it.